Otley (1968 Dick Clement)

 Again, seems well enough reviewed in 2021:

We saw Clement and Ian La Fresnais interviewed - this didn't come up, but their love of football surely did (it crops up here). Their screenplay - based on a novel by Martin Waddell - is conspicuous for their wit, viz. "He's either dead or terribly well - I can't remember which". And "I think Marbella's marvellous." "Yes, but isn't one liable to bump into one's hairdresser?"

Tom Courtenay is the dodgy dealer who gets mixed up in murder and espionage. With Romy Schneider (representing Fashionably Foreign Female casting), Alan Badel, James Villiers, Leonard Rossiter in a great role as a pragmatic assassin, utterly believable, James Bolam & Fiona Lewis (Otley's ex who still has a thing for him), Freddie Jones, Edward Hardwicke & Emma Thompson - I mean Phyllida Law, but the resemblance in appearance and voice is striking - and Geoffrey Bayldon. Full of great one liners, and touches like the copper forgetting to shut the cell door.

I was maybe getting the feeling in the last third that is was one chase too many, but overall, great fun, and interesting London locations - Q correctly identified Bowater House - it's a world I was in, at that time, and could sort of feel it, magnified by having seen it when young, at the cinema, initially, then on TV (23 May 1976). Long opening take is Portobello Road.

Cinematographer Austin Dempster (it looked like it was in 4x3, turns out it isn't - open matte?), music Stanley Myers, editor Richard Best, for Columbia. But the US-backed British films were beginning to flop, films like Isadora, The Wrong Box, Our Mother's House, The Bliss of Mrs Blossom, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Accident and Performance, and the money stopped coming in. The remaining talent (people like Peter Yates. John Schlesinger and John Boorman) went where the money was, and the British film industry all but collapsed. (Well explored in Alexander Walker's 'Hollywood England'.)

Today we saw the Blu-Ray re-release, in 16x9, in which noticed posters for 'Zeta' photo magazine and just a glimpse of a familiar looking poster, which turned out to be The Charge of the Light Brigade!